News agency AFP files lawsuit against Google

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The French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has filed a lawsuit in the District Court of the US District of Columbia against the search engine operator Google. The object of the agency's lawsuit is to stop Google from borrowing without permission headlines, texts and pictures from the agency for its news pages Google News. AFP is suing for what amount to 13.2 million euros in damages. The agency is claiming to have asked Google repeatedly to remove the content in question, with the company having failed to react to the requests, however.

News source: heise online

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#1 bucko on 22 Mar 2005 - 00:45

Like Google are gonna pay them.

(3 replies) #2 Garrett C on 22 Mar 2005 - 01:15

Your news agency is getting free publicity, marketing, and traffic.

What else could you ask for? Google News is helping out a lot of not-so-well known agencies bring their stories to the masses.

Dumb people.

#2.1 dotRoot on 22 Mar 2005 - 03:47

The AFP is a very well known news agency. AFP is probably up there with Rueters.

#2.2 idoia on 22 Mar 2005 - 10:10

actually EFE - REUTERS and AFP are mega big agencies

#2.3 AJCrowley Esq on 22 Mar 2005 - 17:11

QUOTE

Google News is helping out a lot of not-so-well known agencies bring their stories to the masses

Good point. By that logic, I think I'll go and make new albums by lesser known artists and movies by lesser known directors available online, after all, they should be grateful for the free publicity if anything. I'd be surprised it they didn't start mailing me cheques to express their gratitude within days.

(3 replies) #3 Quick Reply on 22 Mar 2005 - 01:52

I don't like the French, or even Europeans (When it comes to the European Union and their anti-trust cases) and I don't like how AFP lease out their stories to 3rd parties without having their own publication for the public to use. But if they asked Google to stop (and on multiple occasions), fair is fair and Google is in the wrong. Most of us use Google a lot and have grown a love Google, but please don't be blinded by the love when Google do something wrong. Keep it in context here.

#3.1 em_te on 22 Mar 2005 - 05:03

AFP and Reuters are companies whose business model is to collect and sell news to media outlets like CNN or the BBC. There's nothing wrong with that.

#3.2 LeNath on 22 Mar 2005 - 14:32

You're so right... Nothing to do with being French or even European. It's about doing business and threats to your business must be put down... As simple as that!

And Google News published AFP content for which one should pay to have access... Not right!!

#3.3 markjensen on 22 Mar 2005 - 14:54

I agree, whole-heartedly!

I like Google, but they need to honor requests from sources who specifically ask to be excluded from their news aggregation crawler. Especially if made several times, as is alleged.

If Google were properly notified, then they were wrong to disregard that request. Seems like AFP is being reasonable about the process of removal (even if I don't know their reasoning for wanting to be removed).

(3 replies) #4 raid517 on 22 Mar 2005 - 02:11

I say burn them. Yep, burn them.

Who on earth are the French to imagine that they have any legal rights?

Damn euros and Frenchies and their 'anti-trust this' and 'sue them that' nonsense.

Don't they understand that American companies should be able to do whatever they want?

(Now how's that for flame bait?

)

GJ

#4.1 username(); on 22 Mar 2005 - 13:12

american pig

#4.2 raid517 on 22 Mar 2005 - 13:38

Lol, don't worry. 95% of all Americans won't get it either...

#4.3 nookadum on 22 Mar 2005 - 15:00

Nice "You Know You're A Patriotic-Retard If You Fell For This" post.

(5 replies) #5 Raptor on 22 Mar 2005 - 03:24

Knowing how wonderfully the French courts have rules in the past, they're probably going to rule in favor of the AFP

.

Why do I view this as a bad thing? Because the AFP is completely wrong on every level in this front. The Internet is a public resource, its design was based around the fast exchange of information. If the AFP wish to protect their content, then they need their own private passworded site. If someone is providing information freely on the net, then people have a right to cite and link to the content. If the content provider feels differently, then they don't belong on the Internet.

Would a robots.txt work on Google news?

#5.1 dotRoot on 22 Mar 2005 - 03:59

If having content on the internet means that anyone means that copyright laws are void, then you should tell the RIAA and the MPAA that. So I guess everyone with intellectual property shouldn't have the information freely available? So no books, no music, no inventions, etc.?

AFP owns the work and therefore Google News does NOT have the right to copy the work without proper credit. And why would a news organization password protect their news? That just doesn't make sense.

robots.txt for Google News? As far as I know Google News doesn't spider like that.

#5.2 em_te on 22 Mar 2005 - 05:14

"filed a lawsuit in the District Court of the US District of Columbia"

#5.3 Planet-Ed on 22 Mar 2005 - 06:29

Yes Google supports the robots.txt as well as other new meta-tags. Not sure APF actually has these implemented on their site or not. If they do and Google is not following them then Google is wrong.

robots.txt is a standard document that can tell Googlebot not to download some or all information from your web server. Googlebot obeys the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive meta-tags. If you place these tags in the head of your HTML document, you can cause Google to not index, not follow, and/or not archive particular documents on your site.

http://www.google.com/bot.html
http://www.google.com/bot.html#robotsinfo
http://www.google.com/bot.html#norobots
http://www.google.com/bot.html#noindextags

#5.4 em_te on 22 Mar 2005 - 07:35

robots.txt for Google News?

The robots.txt file is only for Google's Search engine. Google News is different. Google News parses news information from many news sites and compiles and sorts them together on it's own webpage. Sort of like a RSS feed aggregator, but the information was extracted from the HTML directly.

#5.5 Raptor on 22 Mar 2005 - 21:42

If having content on the Internet means that anyone means that copyright laws are void, then you should tell the RIAA and the MPAA that. So I guess everyone with intellectual property shouldn't have the information freely available? So no books, no music, no inventions, etc.?

Thank you for completely missing my point. APF news stories are legally posted on the Internet. Your analogy to the RIAA and MPAA is about content that is illegally posted. If the RIAA posted an MP3 to the Internet (unprotected and publically accessible) then people would have a right to cite it and link to it.

(3 replies) #6 pre on 22 Mar 2005 - 06:40

F*** robots.txt files! Google should ask for permission before stealing their content!!

#6.1 MrMB on 22 Mar 2005 - 09:59

I disagree. Google News is just a search engine which searches the world wide web for news. Doubtless there is a way to prevent your news turning up on it but why would anyone want to do that.

#6.2 LeNath on 22 Mar 2005 - 14:36

I disagree: On this story, Google is making money by using other company's added value. Not right, although it's a great source of traffic for AFP and others...

#6.3 Billprozac on 22 Mar 2005 - 15:13

That brings into question the legality of commercial seqarch engines in general. Technically Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc make money by using other companies (ie. webpages) added value. By search engine being able to display information from one companies webpage on their site with advertisers that are only paying the search engine, they are profiting from others intellectual property. I feel that a ruling against the news aggregation would adversley affect the search engine community as a whole.

#7 SniperX on 22 Mar 2005 - 10:20

This is nonsense, the robots.txt does stop Google news spidering. If it didn't I see a case, as it does, they need to blame their webmaster.

#8 dudup on 22 Mar 2005 - 13:27

I think you didn't catch one thing: there's no site for AFP!

What they're asking Google is to stop indexing content generated by AFP, no matter in which news site it does appear. Let's say, if that upstate newspaper published some AFP generated news on its own site (and it legally paid for that), what AFP is asking is Google to filter that piece of news from its Google News service.

I think that's ridiculous, because if the news site publishing that AFP content already paid for that, and if it's not delivering that licensed content to others, then there's nothing wrong with it. I understand why Google hasn't solved this matter with AFP yet.

To be honest, I think they are afraid, because they business model is under threat by Google News.

(1 reply) #9 DisturbedRoach on 22 Mar 2005 - 15:16

How is it borrowing without permission?

I mean all it shows is the headline with maybe a sentence or two about the article. The article is still linked to the news source? Google is not claiming it is theirs, so why would they sue.

Either way 13 million is not that much to google.

#9.1 C_Guy on 22 Mar 2005 - 16:41

It's not, Google isn't "borrowing" anything, they are just searching for news and Displaying the results. Correct me if I am wrong (please!) but I think that when Google returns news hits they always credit the source - they never claim ownership to any news title, article, or photo that isn't theirs.

This lawsuit should be thrown out if the judge can stop laughing long enough.

...C_Guy

#10 DannySalerno on 22 Mar 2005 - 16:04

This happens everyday.. What else is new

#11 nic on 22 Mar 2005 - 16:07

What's next? Law suits from Google's caching service? I love that thing...

#12 nvizible on 22 Mar 2005 - 17:01

well, as they say in the publishing biz: there's no such thing as bad publicity!

basically, this random news agency has decided to sue for a lot of cash coz they are doing badly this year or something. oh, and google does have a disclaimer saying that the news on its page is taken from other news agencies and is not the property of google. in addition, the company must then also ask google to remove their company from its search listings, as that is also using their content by displaying selected parts of their website in search results.

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